Converge

mobile app for learning about your interests

Discovering through collaboration

College students are in an exploratory time where for many, they are beginning to research and think about their adult and professional identities. Sometimes, students stick to groups that they are comfortable with, limiting their exposure to other groups and people whom they can learn from and network with.

Converge is a mobile application that helps college students discover and connect to their classmates. Using students’ expressed interests, it organizes information around collaborative opportunities that help students connect to classmates interested in cross-functional endeavors. Think of it like MeetUp on campus meets LinkedIn for collaborative projects. Through the app, college students can explore their professional interests while connecting to likeminded people and building a network of collaborators that can evolve and grow with them.

Design Brief

The project goal was to design an experience that helps college students discover and connect to their classmates without relying on email.

Exploratory Research

To guide the design, I spoke with students at Carnegie Mellon and reflected on numerous conversations with friends about their academic studies and professional lives.

Key Insights

Design Principles

When it comes to professional networking, students tend to already be comfortable knowing themselves, but they may not know what they do not know.

Allow students to grow and discover experiences that will help shape their professional lives

They may largely still feel comfortable in social settings rather than professional settings.

Connecting has more to do with making friends and working on fun projects together in a safe and supportive environment.

Students identify with academic institutions but many opportunities exist across institutions and across departments within them.

Honor university as an organizational entity but enable collaboration across departmental and social groups.

They will change over time and discover new things about themselves and their professional aspirations.

Provide a foundation for networking over time as students grow and evolve.

Focused Question

How can we design an experience that allows students to network while learning from the experiences of others?

Three Core Concepts

Use Case

A use case shows how students could connect with others through the app.

UI Comps

A series of wireframes was created to illustrate UX flows (pink arrows) and data flows (blue arrows).

High-Fidelity Screens

Select high fidelity screens were quickly mocked up to highlight features.

Going Forward

Although this was part of a one-week design sprint, there is an idea here for designing for people to find creative collaborators. To take this project forward, I would reframe it as a service design exercise and explore how creative and collaborative communities are formed.